Can I make offline backups of email accounts in Mail?

[67952]

I use the Mail app in macOS High Sierra.

I want to make a backup copy of my emails that I could store on external hard drives and then “drag and drop” back into the Mail app in the future should I ever need to access theme again.

After I have backups of these emails, I want to delete them from the server they are stored on that Mail accesses them from.

Is it possible to do this?

Ideally, I’d like to be able to save all emails from one account (iCloud, Gmail, my personal website hosting) into each their own archive file containing all of the emails for one account.

Is that possible?

Thanks for any help! Really unsure of how to do this.

 

[BrianBaughn]

“Drag and Drop”…no.

You can create a new mailbox “On My Mac” and move messages to that new mailbox. You can then export (it will be an “MBOX” file) the new mailbox. After it’s exported and saved somewhere, you can delete it. To bring the messages back you have to import the mbox that you exported.

I suggest you test this method a couple of times with some throwaway emails just to be sure you understand what’s going on.

 

[dianeoforegon]

Check out Eaglefiler. You can import your messages into Eaglefiler. You can reply to an email from EF and it will open the message in Mail. The libraries created by EagleFiler can be stored on an external drive an used like Photo and iTunes Libraries.

EagleFiler

http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/